At the very kind and generous invitation of my excellent friend and old roommate Tony, I spent Eid in Kosova!
The trip to Prishtina was fairly uneventful - a jam-packed flight full of Kosovars going home for the holidays. (I flew in on the 19th of Dec - the eve of Eid (aka Bajram, as they say in Albanian).
Interestingly, I didn’t need a visa: Kosova is not independent yet - hence, no embassies; but it’s no longer a part of Serbia either and is fully administered by the United Nations. In Kosova, Big Brother has a name: UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo). Bottom line, no visas. Yey!
I did have to lie though ‘— twice in Vienna: I said I was going for UN work and had to flash (yeah right) my Vienna UN ID. Never thought that would come handy one day!! I guess this consultancy wasn’t such a lousy idea after all :)
I am met at the airport by Tony, who takes me on a quick ride through Prishtina and onwards to Gjilan, his hometown, which is 50km away from Prishtina and where we spend the next two days and a half... well, feasting, visiting family, enjoying the warmth inside in a -7 degrees weather.
So unlike myself, yes - instead of the military-style tourism I impose on myself, this lazying around was very relaxing and extremely enjoyable. Who’d have known... :)
Plus we did go out; besides the family and friends visits (an unavoidable custom for Bajram) and the litres of juice and tea and the tons of cake I ate, we went to a couple of pubs and clubs, and even attended a concert by this big singer - Sinan Vilasaliu!. And I can tell you - it’s impressive to see young people in a relatively remote small town in Kosova wording the lyrics to some REM song that was playing. Music is so cross-boundary! (and we’re so globalised!!)
Day 4 was in Prishtina - a small town, not very interesting for a tourist - you can really ‘do’ the city in half a day - but it’s very interesting to witness its evolution into the embryo of a national capital. Some monuments from the Yougoslav era - such as the frankly hilarious “Unity and Brotherhood” monument that it supposed to symbolise the good relations between Serbs, Albanians, and Turks (sad joke, huh?), a number of mosques from the Ottoman era. Then the UNMIK HQ, the various KFOR (NATO forces in Kosovo) cars and uniforms, the new government institutions, etc.
Day 5 was quite something. We were supposed to go tour Kosova, Tony was to show me some of the main sights of the war (with Serbia, during which the Serbs attempted to ethnically cleanse (can we say genocide?) the Albanians and which ended by the US bombing Belgrade) but then we got a change of plan.
Next post :)
I’ll be putting up photos in the coming week or so. Generally, photos are at http://picasaweb.google.com/traveller.within so keep checking!
(and FYI: Kosova is the Albanian - local - name of the country (the region, for now). Kosovo is the Serbian name for it. While Kosovars themselves may use Kosovo when speaking in English, they appreciate if you do the effort of saying the country's name correctly.)
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